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Thursday, 17 July 2014

Magic Thursday - A Ghost Story with Special Guest Alison Stuart + Giveaway!

It's my pleasure today to welcome the completely wonderful Alison Stuart to the Dark Side Down Under blog! Alison writes fabulous historical romances set during the 17th century, the Regency and the Great War, and she has also woven in ghosts and time traveling in some of her books :-)

Alison is here today to tell us about some ghostly encounters...

Nothing like a good ghost story…

As far as I know, I have never actually
seen a ghost but I’ve always had a fascination with ghost stories. This began
with my mother’s tale of a ghostly encounter in a Youth Hostel in Wales. My mother is an extremely sensible
woman and not one given to histrionics or flights of fancy. The story, as she
tells it, is that she and a friend on a cycling tour of Wales in the early 1950s stayed the night in
a converted castle that was now used as a Youth Hostel. She woke during the
night to the sensation of a woman’s fingers brushing her cheek. She could
clearly see a woman bending over her and as she watched the figure dissolved
into the wall.

My own paranormal experiences have been
far less impressive and really take the form of an emotional response to a
place rather than ghostly figures. The most powerful occurred when I visited WarwickCastle in my early 20s (before it became the
theme park it is today) and like all tourists went down to the cells below the
castle. The feeling of misery was so overwhelming I felt as if I would
suffocate. On subsequent visits to the castle nothing and nobody has been able
to induce me to go down to those cells again.

In the course of my career I worked in
at least two haunted buildings. Both of them were former nineteenth century
mansions and both had been used by the Australian Army for many, many years.

The first, “Netherby” in Queens RoadMelbourne was the Headquarters of the 3rd
Training Group during my time but had been, reputedly, used by ASIO in the
1950s. There were stories of soundproofed cellars and secret tunnels but no
evidence has ever been found of either, even during Netherby’s more recent
conversion to a wing of a grand hotel. Nothing untoward happened to me in all the
years I worked at Netherby but I did start to pick up the stories of “Albert”
reputedly the lonely ghost of a Rumanian spy. I collected quite a few eye
witness reports on Albert and It started me on a quest to track down more ghost
stories from Army establishments. I figured soldiers made fairly reliable
witnesses.

The other haunted mansion in Queens Road is Grosvenor which was Headquarters 4th
Brigade when I first went there. Like Netherby it has long since been sold and
is now a rather depressed facade to some particularly ghastly apartments.
Grosvenor was far grander than Netherby and was reputedly haunted by
“Esmerelda”, a young maid servant who had been found drowned in the swamp that
is now AlbertParkLake. Esmerelda and I did have some
firsthand contact and like Albert she is well chronicled.

You can find the stories of “Albert”
and “Esmerelda”
on my own blog (just click the hyperlink).

Over the years, wherever an opportunity
has presented, I have gone on ghost tours some hokey and some downright spooky.
You will have found me trailing lantern bearing guides in York, New Orleans,
Edinburgh, Port Arthur (now there is a spooky place!), Sydney Quarantine
Station to name a few. Even my own home town, the historical port of Williamstown, runs a ghost tour, although with a huge
modern development going ahead which is ripping the heart out of the old town,
I fear its days are numbered. Good one… planning authorities!

It was natural at some point in my
writing career ghosts would creep in and you will find a couple of ghostly
short stories in my collected short stories, TOWER OF TALES (Lost Souls and The Promise).The unsettling antics of the ghosts in my
World War One story, GATHER
THE BONES are gleaned from the many stories I have gathered over the years.
For example, the evil, ghostly hand clasping the wrist, comes from New Orleans
and relates to the story of slaves waiting to be sold (New Orleans does a
particularly scary line in ghosts – it was one ghost tour I was glad to do in
daylight!). It was fun to write but a challenge to present my ghostly
characters as credible.

I would love to hear about any ghostly
encounters you may have had and there is an e-copy of TOWER OF TALES on offer for a randomly drawn
commenter.

ABOUT ALISON:

Alison on a ghost tour in Edinburgh

Alison Stuart is an award winning
Australian writer of cross genre historical romances.She is a digital first published author,
whose 6th published book, LORD SOMERTON’S HEIR has just been
released by Harlequin Australia. If your taste is for duelling cavaliers,
wayward ghosts, time travel and murder mysteries – sometimes all in the same
book – Alison’s stories are for you.

Alison
is a lapsed lawyer who has worked in the military and fire service, with an
obvious obsession for men in uniform, which may explain a predisposition to
soldier heroes.She lives in
Williamstown with her own personal hero (and yes, he was wearing a uniform when
they met!) and two cats and subsists on a diet of gin and tonic.

In
the shadow of the Great War, grieving widow, Helen Morrow and her husband’s
cousin, the wounded and reclusive Paul, are haunted not only by the horrors of
the trenches but ghosts from another time and another conflict.

As the desperate voice of the young woman
reaches out to them from the pages of a coded diary, Paul and Helen are bound
together in their search for answers, not only to the old mystery but also the
circumstances surrounding the death of Helen’s husband at Passchandaele in1917.

As
the two stories become entwined, Paul and Helen will not find peace until the
mysteries are solved.

2 comments:

My mother has seen a ghost. She woke up one night to see a young girl in a long nightdress in the room. My mother says she was not afraid & then in the blink of an eye the child was gone. This is a woman NOT given to flights of fancy, so if she says she saw a ghost I believe her.